PMSDR is a small, cheap and high quality SDR Receiver. It was conceived by Martin Pernter Iw3AUT some years ago. I have been using it for both hobby and scientific research, loving its stability and ease of use.

After a long time, during which the receiver collected dust on a shelf in my office, I decided to bring it again to life for the WebSDR project. I’ll not give details on the work of PA3FWM, please visit its site to learn about its work.

The WebSDR project is addressed both to hamradio enthusiast both to students of the University where I work. SDR technologies are wide spread and it’s time to talk about this subject in the telecommunications oriented courses that are held at University. So I think that the possibility to show some real application of SDR can support the learning path of students, trying to catch their curiosity.

Phase 1 of the projects requires to setup a basic system, using PMSDR and RTL-SDR dongle in order to evaluate performances and get acquainted with WebSDR software.

RTL-SDR.
Configuring the dongle to work in WebSDR is quite easy. It requires the installation of rtl-sdr package in order to provide rtl_tcp command.

After connecting the dongle to the PC, you can check it has been correctly recognised with the lsusb command.

In order to let the dongle receive and forward data, you can use the rtl_tcp program. It will create a socket and stream I/Q samples through it. Put this command in your rc.local file to execute it as a daemon during computer boot.

rtl_tcp -a 127.0.0.1 -p 65144 -f 145000000 -d 0

Remembre that if you want to change the receiving frequency, you have to modify THIS script, otherwise nothing will happen. The command stated shows -p switch, in order to set the streaming port, the -f to set the working frequency and -d to address a specific device in case you have multiple dongles.

The “85” shows the amount of ppm correction to apply in the frequency.

PMSDR
Setting up the PMSDR may be a little “tricky”. First of all you have to consider this is a “near-zero IF SDR”: it will provide an audio baseband signal to a sound-card. First of all you have to setup an ALSA sound system. If you (like me) are not very familiar with Linux audio world, well “don’t panic”. The sound-card I use with PMSDR is USB connected. So let’s check it:

Before trying to go any further is mandatory to check if ALSA can support your hardware. In any other case all your efforts will result in a total loss of time. According to ALSA site, the SB X-Fi in UNSUPPORTED.

So let’s give up and try another Audio Adapter, this time embedded device:

WebSDR configuration file wants to know 3 parameters: card,device, subdevice. Using this command we can retrive all data we need, as the card number is “0”, the device is “0” and the device is “0” as well. Write this parameters and forget them.

Now you need a way to interact with PMSDR internal PIC in order to program the internal oscillators. More over, if your PMSDR is equipped with a Downconverter board, you have to program it as well. There is a small,yet realiable and easy-to-use, client which was written by Andrea Montefusco and is available on sourceforge. You have to build it, so install gcc and read carefully the installation notes. After the program has been built, run it by “pmsdr”. There is an embedded help system.

In order to set PMSDR for 2m reception you need to program downconverter first:
dfilter 1
fd 116000000
In this way 144MHz is downconverted to 28MHz. So the next step is
filter 0
f 28000000
save it!
memf 28000000.

Now let’s go back to WebSDR and let’s write some configuration for PMSDR as well:
#pmsdr per i 2m
band 2m
#alsa devices are: card/dev/subdev
device $hw:0,0,0
samplerate 96000
centerfreq 144320

Some screenshot taken with lab equipment, showing the receiver busy in demodulating a carrier at 144.290 MHz (frequency choosen where the waterfall was clean).

So the work is over. Everything should be fine and you should be able to run the server. I’m still very disappointed that I was unable to use a better soundcard. I did some testing with a PCI M-Audio Audiophile 2496 but I was unable to let it work.

The AIS decoder system has been up and running since March 2012. Since then database table have been growing up at a good rate. This year I decided to clean up the system before everything goes bananas.

The ais_stat_data table was really huge and it was really mandatory to cut some lines and make it lighter and faster.

Some old and unuseful tables were removed and data was stored in a safe place. After the cleaning database looks more “fit” and light.

The system is now up ‘n running and is ready to face 2017 AIS messages. Stay tuned!